Welcome to the 21st edition of the Analyst of the Month.
This month we highlight Ryan Watkins, Co-Founder of Syncracy Capital, a high-conviction thesis-driven hedge fund that publishes deep research and takes long-term bets in crypto. Prior to starting his own fund, Ryan was an investment banking analyst and a researcher at Messari which is evident by his publications at Syncracy. Articles like their Solana Thesis and Hyperliquid Thesis are heavily cited, and demonstrate the value of fundamental and data-driven investments over just trading on narratives.
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Read on to learn about Ryan’s journey into crypto, his views on fundamental investing, and his thoughts on Solana, Hyperliquid, and the cryptoeconomy at large!
1. What is your story? What was your journey into investing and crypto?
I first discovered Bitcoin in 2014 through a friend who was using the Silk Road. The use case didn’t interest me, but it did put Bitcoin on my radar. I loosely followed along over the next few years and even attended Consensus in 2016, but I still didn’t quite get it. In hindsight, it was the peak of the enterprise blockchain hype cycle, so I found myself unamused by all these boring old companies talking about “distributed ledger technology.”
It wasn’t until the summer of 2017 that I finally caught the bug. It started with a headline on Bloomberg that read something like “ETH is up 2,500% year-to-date.” I couldn’t believe my eyes; until then, I had thought crypto was mainly for criminals and wannabe hip enterprises. I immediately started learning as fast as I could to understand what the bubble was all about. After completing my investment banking internship that summer, I spent all my free time learning about Bitcoin and Ethereum.
At the time, I had never thought critically about money, despite it being a foundational pillar of civilization. So I found myself fascinated by the question of what practical benefits decentralized money could bring to society. The whole idea felt counterintuitive because every institution I’d encountered until then operated as a top-down hierarchy (or so I thought). I spent the better part of my senior year in college going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. It profoundly reshaped my worldview.
Once I learned that Ethereum could expand Bitcoin’s vision beyond money—and potentially reimagine all our financial and internet institutions – I knew I had to build a career in this space. From there, I spent the year after graduation networking for crypto jobs until I finally found the opportunity to leave investment banking for Messari. In the fall of 2019, I became one of the first analysts on Messari’s research team.
2. You started your career as an investment banking analyst before moving to crypto investment research at Messari. How did working in TradFi and then hardcore data-driven research influence your mental models on valuing and investing in crypto?
Working in TradFi provides great training. It grounds you in the fundamentals and breeds a healthy skepticism – both essential for navigating the wild west of crypto. Even today, understanding basic valuation theory and corporate finance can offer real edge, given how immature this market still is. Nevertheless, I’ve also found it helpful not to be too rigid in carrying over mental models from TradFi. Crypto is best understood from first principles.
I’ll never forget how often skeptics told me that Bitcoin was worthless because it didn’t produce cash flows. Yet here we are today: Bitcoin is a $2 trillion asset, with institutions of all shapes and sizes scrambling to get exposure.
Above all, investment banking gave me strong data analysis and presentation skills. This proved incredibly valuable as the first on-chain analytics tools rolled out in 2019–2020 and the on-chain economy began to take shape. Being one of the first analysts to explore and explain this data played a meaningful role in accelerating my career. Today, it’s an essential part of my process for understanding where the crypto economy is headed. It’s a gift to be able to track fundamental metrics for every project in my portfolio in real time, 24/7/365.
3. In your opinion, does momentum, memes, and technical trading still dominate crypto or is fundamental analysis becoming the dominant investment narrative?
Crypto is a speculative asset class. There’s no way around it. It’s retail-dominated, offers venture-style upside, and trades with public markets liquidity. Oftentimes, at the earliest stages of a project’s life cycle, there’s little to grasp onto other than ideas. So unsurprisingly, crypto has historically traded on hopes and dreams more than fundamentals.
This dynamic is amplified by the fact that the biggest TAM in the asset class – becoming global money – can’t be valued using traditional cash flow-based models. For better or worse, this continues to shape investor psychology, despite most assets in the cryptoeconomy having nothing to do with global money. It also lends itself to blowing bubbles – the single thing crypto is best known for.
This is all to say: momentum and narratives continue to be important drivers of financial outcomes, even as the industry matures. Fundamentals are becoming more important over time, and often precede momentum and narratives, but they are not enough on their own to drive returns unless you extend your horizon.
While I believe fundamentals will come to dominate in due time, I also believe narratives and momentum will never go away – and can even shape the fundamentals of projects. There are a handful of examples of projects, especially L1s, whose growth was accelerated by flows and narratives concentrating on their ecosystem.
4. For the past two years, Syncracy has stayed extremely bullish on Solana. What do you think are the strongest tailwinds for Solana going into the second half of 2025 and beyond?
The institutionalization of the cryptoeconomy will be the primary driver of growth moving forward. Solana is best positioned to capture this trend, as it is the most performant and battle-tested globally distributed ledger in production. With regulatory clarity emerging in the U.S., the Solana Foundation’s “Internet Capital Markets” thesis is coming to life, as a growing number of capital markets and payments use cases move on-chain.
By the end of 2025, I expect multiple private companies to IPO or directly list on Solana, alongside publicly traded U.S. firms pursuing dual listings. I also anticipate a resurgence of ICOs – this time with greater regulatory support and institutional capital. Several top-tier teams are actively building toward this vision, and the momentum within the Solana ecosystem is currently unmatched across the cryptoeconomy.
5. You have previously written that “blockchains store value, while applications capture fees”. Does this mean that although the private companies have been long taught to measure success by their bottom-line, blockchain infrastructure companies should tweak their measure of success?
The distinction between Bitcoin as “gold” and other L1 assets as “equity” is a meme. Every asset natively issued on a blockchain is non-sovereign, seizure-resistant, and digitally transferable anywhere on Earth. There’s nothing intrinsically different about Bitcoin. In the long run, I expect the largest base layer assets – like SOL and ETH – to accrue a monetary premium through their use as collateral and currency within their internal economies.
Unlike Bitcoin, smart contract platforms are expressive enough to support “Bitcoin-like” assets that can be used non-custodially within a more dynamic, diverse, and composable on-chain financial system. This represents a massive opportunity if you believe the on-chain economy will one day rival those of G7 countries. I’m certainly bullish.
That said, I don’t believe this monetary premium can be forced, and I think L1s should focus on maximizing fee generation for the foreseeable future. Setting aside the circular challenge of generating fees in a self-issued, unbacked currency, higher fees offer several benefits. For one, they help establish an intrinsic floor for the staked asset. Additionally, stronger fee generation may enhance an asset’s monetary characteristics by reducing net inflation – potentially addressing the fee sustainability problem facing Bitcoin.
One thing you’ll notice is that I’m suggesting an asset can be both equity-like and gold-like. This phenomenon isn’t without precedent. Many real-world assets function this way like real estate, for example. Billions of dollars flow from China into New York City real estate each year not in search of low single-digit returns or a new residence, but in search of an inflation-resistant, seizure-resistant asset at scale. These investors willingly pay a monetary premium to escape more unstable political and economic environments. I expect a portion of these flows to eventually find their way into the cryptoeconomy.
6. What we’ve always enjoyed about your research is the extent to which it is driven by data and fundamentals. What has been the most challenging part of navigating crypto data?
There are plenty of challenges, but one of the most frustrating is the inconsistency of data across platforms. It’s already difficult enough to find relevant data for every project I’m interested in – let alone data that’s standardized and comparable. When the numbers also differ from platform to platform, it creates even more work just to double-check everything.
7. Hyperliquid has been getting increasingly popular recently, and you have stated that you believe the protocol can become the highest fee-generating blockchain in the cryptoeconomy. What would you say are the leading indicators for a protocol like Hyperliquid?
The most important metrics to track for Hyperliquid are exchange volumes and open interest across both perp and spot markets, measured on both an absolute and relative basis. Ideally, these should trend higher over time, alongside market share gains versus incumbents like Binance. Everything else flows downstream from that.
I’m also excited about the developer metrics in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Their developer momentum is the strongest I've seen in a long time, but you wouldn't know it only looking at the HyperEVM. I expect an explosion of sub-exchanges and trading platforms on Hyperliquid in the quarters ahead using builder codes and HIP-3. Think of it as the unbundling of Binance.
8. How have you been able to use Artemis in your fundamental research?
Yes. Artemis has some of the most comprehensive data in the industry when it comes to doing fundamental research. Data analysis is an essential part of my process. In fact, I’m currently working on a new research piece I’ll share in the coming weeks that is anchored by Artemis data. I think it will show some trends no one has visualized before.
How to get in contact with Ryan?
You can find or reach out to Ryan on Twitter or LinkedIn.
